Increasingly, companies are moving away from applications which they run and manage within their own local datacenter to cloud based applications which run in a remote data center managed by a third party. Users access these applications via an Internet browser application (e.g., Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer). To provide both regular employees with an easy way to access these web-based applications and to enable system administrators to be able to oversee and manage employee access to these web-based application, a number of companies offer portals or interfaces for accessing these web-based applications and/or for managing user accounts associated with the portal and/or the individual web-based applications themselves. Such systems are referred to as cloud management systems.
However, some such systems have installation issues. Many companies use firewalls to protect their computer systems and some software developers may require a client to make changes to their firewall during installation of their product. This is unattractive for a number of reasons. First, modifying a firewall (e.g., to create a “hole”) requires specific knowledge and some companies may not have a dedicated system administrator and/or one with the necessary knowledge to make the change. Also, the security of the client's computer systems may be compromised by the changes to the firewall. It would be desirable if installation and subsequent operation of a cloud management system could be implemented without having to make changes to a firewall.